Madam, - Brendan Butler (June 26th) chides me for ignoring the recent ESRI report on the effects of immigration from central and eastern Europe in my letter of June 21th.
While Mr Butler is entitled to quote his pet sentence from this academic report which, he claims, demolishes my "dubious conclusions", the report suggests that evidence of displacement was "circumstantial". As it cannot investigate the black economy, where abject exploitation exists, it does not reflect the real world and does not explain why workers have gone to prison in an effort to highlight displacement and wage degradation in certain sectors of the economy.
Mr Butler takes issue with my description of immigration from eastern Europe as "unregulated low-wage immigration". It is unregulated because that is what the Government decided it should be, taking no account of the size or the needs of our labour market, thereby creating downward pressure on wages and working conditions. It is low-wage because the immigrants are largely employed in poorly paid jobs. This is not a reflection on the immigrants' educational or social status. Far from blaming immigrants for low pay, I have repeatedly accused the Government of deliberately using them to copperfasten a two-tier economy on US lines. Indeed, if the Government did not desire to create a substantial low-wage sector, under the guise of promoting interculturalism, it could have gone down the Canadian road. There, an active immigration programme encourages only the highly skilled and highly educated. As a result, and in contrast to the US, Canada remains a far more equal society with a far smaller alienated underclass.
Mr Butler states that the construction, industrial and hospitality sectors are not known for high wages. I concur as I worked in all three sectors. I also know that when you over-supply these labour markets you can encourage, with little benefit to consumers, wage degradation and poorer working conditions regardless of rules and regulations.
Finally, Mr Butler shares my concern about the effect immigration into Ireland is having on immigrants' countries of origin. Perhaps he might extend that concern to the growing low-wage sector of the Irish economy and offer his considerable influence to encourage employers to be more magnanimous to workers in these sectors. - Yours, etc,
SIMON O'DONNELL, Church Place, Rathmines, Dublin 6.